Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (89 page)

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Authors: Samantha Power

BOOK: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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For me personally as an Iraqi, I believe that the resolutions of the UN were not just and a lot of harm has been caused to the Iraqi people for thirteen years, like hunger and diseases. Actually, the [UN] sanctions were on the Iraqi people and not on the government . . . Secondly, a lot of Islamic countries have been through injustices and various occupations and foreign troops using the UN resolutions . . . against Muslim people under the name of the UN. Maybe the UN is not the one issuing these resolutions, but there are super powers using the UN. Crimes are committed in Islamic countries and so we wanted to send the message to this organization . . . The compromise can be before the fight, but not after the fight, and if the UN wanted to rescue the people, it should have intervened before the catastrophe [took] place . . . A lot of families and children have been killed.
 
 
 
 
Al-Kurdi pleaded not guilty in the Iraqi court. He explained his reasoning: “Maybe during some of the operations innocent civilians were killed, but we didn’t intend or mean to kill any child, and if it happened by mistake we asked God for mercy and forgiveness.” The insurgency was fully justified, he said:
 
 
My country is occupied, and I didn’t go [to] any other country to fight ... My country has been occupied by foreign troops without any international legitimacy, and the people have been killed, and my religion says that I should fight. Even the Christians and the Seculars say that when your country is occupied you have to fight the occupier, and that’s not only in the Muslim countries but also in the Christian areas like Vietnam, Somalia, and Haiti. Where the countries are occupied, it is legitimate to resist the occupier.There is no religion or international norms or traditions whether Eastern or Western or anybody who is supporting the occupation of my country from either a religious or an intellectual point of view. The ones who cooperate with the occupier should receive the same treatment that the occupier receives . . . As far as I’m concerned, I’m innocent. I didn’t kill any people from the street. I didn’t steal money from any house . . . There are thousands of Iraqis who are in Abu Ghraib jail or other jails of the occupation without charge for two or three years and nobody can help, and you are telling me that you don’t want them to attack the UN or the Red Cross or others . . . When the Americans came, they stepped on our heads with their shoes so what do you expect us to do? Death is more honorable than life . . .You can ask the regular people about this, and now even the people they are wishing that the days of Saddam would come back.
34
 
 
 
 
On July 3, 2007, as U.S. troops in Iraq prepared to take time away from the bloody civil war in order to mark American Independence Day, the Iraqi government hanged al-Kurdi. In the few wire stories that covered his execution, journalists referred to several of the high-profile attacks he had helped to orchestrate. None saw fit to mention his involvement in the attack on the United Nations.
 
EPILOGUE
By the time Sergio Vieira de Mello went to Iraq, he knew too much. He knew that governments were prone to define their national interests in the short term and to neglect the common good. He knew that dangerous armed groups were feeding off of individual and collective humiliation and growing in strength and number. He knew that they were often more nimble and more adaptive than the states that opposed them. And he knew that the UN, the multinational organization that he believed had to step up to meet transnational security, socioeconomic, environmental, and health concerns, had a knack for “killing the flame”—the flame of idealism that motivated some to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come.
Vieira de Mello made mistakes and delivered few unvarnished successes that could be guaranteed to last (the world being too complex for guarantees). Nonetheless, as long as he was around—treating the most intractable conflicts as if peace were one phone call away, eschewing diplomatic hierarchy in the frantic pursuit of solutions, and remaining unflappable, impeccable, and seemingly untouchable while the shells rained down around him—a flame continued to flicker somewhere.
He is now gone. But what are we to take from what he saw, what he learned, what we lost? Where, in other words, do we go from here?
While many have responded to today’s divisions and insecurities with ideology, Vieira de Mello’s life steers us away from one-size-fits-all doctrine to a principled, flexible pragmatism that can adapt to meet diffuse and unpredictable challenges.
 
A BROKEN SYSTEM
 
In the aftermath of the bomb at the Canal Hotel, Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempted to convey just how irreplaceable Vieira de Mello had become and just how severe the loss would be for the world. “I had only one Sergio,” he said simply.
1
He knew nobody who had Vieira de Mello’s linguistic skills, cultural breadth, critical mind, political savvy, humanitarian commitments, and world-weary wisdom. “Sergio,” as he was known to heads of state and refugees around the world, had long ago surpassed the legend of his mentor Thomas Jamieson. Confronted by crises, he had often asked, “What would Jamie do?” And henceforth generations of diplomats and humanitarians will likely ask, “What would Sergio do?”
Vieira de Mello began each mission by trying to “get real”: to see the world as it was rather than as he might have liked it to be. Today getting real means recognizing that the most pressing threats on the horizon are transnational and thus cannot be tackled by a single country. But getting real also requires acknowledging that the international system is polarized and slow, just when we need cooperation and urgent action. Vieira de Mello was a UN man to his core, determined to “show the UN flag” whenever he arrived in a war-torn area. Throughout his career UN successes—in spurring decolonization, helping refugees return to their homes, persuading militants to engage in political processes, sponsoring elections, and ushering in independence—filled him with a seemingly guileless pride. The UN remained the embodiment of the “world’s conscience” for him because it was the place where governments assembled to enshrine their legal and moral commitments. It was the home of the international rules that, if followed, would breed greater peace and security. But by the time of his death he was deeply worried that the system he had joined thirty-four years before was not up to the task of dealing with the barbarism and lawlessness of the times. “I am the first person to recognize that the UN leaves a lot to be desired,” he acknowledged.
2
He conceded that the “transition from the ideal to the real is often extremely long, hard, costly, and cruel.”
3
He knew that the organization he cherished was at once an actor in its own right and simply a building, no better or worse than the collective will of the countries that constituted it. The UN-the-actor needed to be reformed. Twentieth-century rules were no match for twenty-first-century crises. Mediocrity and corruption among UN personnel had to be weeded out, but accountability could not simply mean additional paperwork or micromanaging from Headquarters, as it usually did. UN civil servants had to become more self-critical and introspective, accepting what had taken Vieira de Mello years to learn: that they are agents of change themselves and not simply the servants of powerful governments.
His clashes with Dennis McNamara arose because, in his friend’s view, “Sergio sided with power.” He had sided with governments in helping organize the forced return of the Vietnamese and Rwandan refugees, and he had been so mute about Serbian atrocities that he had earned the nickname “Serbio.” Once he moved to UN Headquarters in New York, however, while he was always careful to gauge the prevailing winds, he was less prone to simply defer to them. He stood up more frequently for the rights and needs of civilians, defying the wishes of the United States to lead an assessment mission into Kosovo under the cover of NATO bombing and arguing forcefully, when the pro-Indonesian militia began burning down East Timor, that UN officials in the country could not abandon the desperate Timorese, no matter what UN member states were saying. “For once,” he argued to his senior colleagues, “let’s allow the states on the [Security] Council to make the wrong decisions instead of saving them the trouble by making the wrong decisions for them.”When he himself governed East Timor, he played by UN rules at the start. But governments had written those rules for an era of peacekeeping when UN troops interpositioned themselves as a “thin blue line” between two sides that had agreed to a cease-fire. The regulations were woefully ill suited for multifaceted missions in countries still racked by internal violence or where the UN had to rebuild whole institutions from scratch. When he realized that he was losing the support of the Timorese, he changed course, taking the revolutionary step of appointing Timorese to supervise their UN underlings. He chose his battles. He seemed to have an uncanny sense of how to bend UN rules to their breaking point without gaining a reputation for insubordination.
But there was only so much one UN civil servant could do. Whether the UN could help “humanize history,” as he put it, would not turn on whether UN bureaucrats became more self-critical or how loudly they howled about an injustice. If the UN was to become a truly constructive, stabilizing twenty-first-century player, as it had to be, the
governments
in the building would have to change their preferences and their behavior. This would mean throwing their weight behind tasks the UN performed well—by supporting the work of the specialized humanitarian field agencies such as UNHCR, vastly improving the logistic and strategic support for UN peacekeeping missions, and making use of the UN’s convening powers to deepen and broaden the rules governing international and internal state practices on such vital concerns as climate change and terrorism. But it would also mean being selective, and not asking the UN to do too much, or to perform tasks that could better be performed by regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, philanthropic foundations, or new quasi-governmental operational entities like the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria or the International Criminal Court (ICC) (both of which governments deliberately set up outside the UN system).
Vieira de Mello saw that frustrated countries were increasingly working around UN gridlock and assembling in smaller bodies according to geography or shared interests. Believing there were more than enough deadly challenges to go around, he generally treated security and development initiatives outside the UN not as competitors, but as partners. But he was irritated by what he saw as a tendency to romanticize such initiatives, whose success would turn on some of the very same member states that had proven unreliable in the UN. Whatever the precise shape or composition of an international grouping, he argued, if the countries inside these bodies didn’t change, many of the UN’s weaknesses—diplomatic gridlock, bureaucratic red tape, or insufficient political will—would undermine their performance. In his view, there was no silver bullet or reform “fix” on the horizon. There was only the messy, thankless work of trying to change states’ perceptions of their interests. When countries like the United States began speaking of bypassing the UN—and building a new, more amicable “community of democracies”—he understood the appeal. After all, the UN itself was initially founded as a club for like-minded countries. But in the long run he did not see how global threats could be tackled without engaging undemocratic states or rogue nations. Since all of the looming challenges crossed borders, states would have to cooperate and burden-share, and the United Nations remained the only international institution that gathered representatives from all countries in one place.
Vieira de Mello knew from his own journey that when the countries on the Security Council were united and determined to enforce peace and security, his peacemaking or state-building missions stood far higher odds of bringing results. If powerful countries were divided or, as often happened, if their attention wandered, the belligerents and spoilers took heed. “The UN is an instrument, a frame, an engine,” he noted. It would be “as dynamic, as conciliatory, as innovative, as successful” as governments “wish it, allow it, make it be.”
4
But just how dynamic or successful
did
they wish it to be?
The UN did not create global divisions among rich and poor, secular and religious, urban and rural, modern and traditional. But because the UN is the only global meeting place, those tensions play themselves out in its decision-making chambers. Today, almost five years after Vieira de Mello’s death, just when consensus is most needed, the Security Council is more divided than it has been since the end of the cold war. China, which rarely asserted itself at the UN during most of Vieira de Mello’s career, is “coming out” economically and geopolitically.While many Western leaders hail the erosion of sovereignty in a globalized world, China clings to it, contending that others have no business meddling in its or anybody else’s domestic affairs.
China is not alone. The so-called petro-authoritarian countries, led by Russia, have rolled back their democratic domestic gains and begun leveraging their natural resources to bully their neighbors. European powers still seem confused about how to make use of their newfound collective weight. And the United States, because of its war in Iraq, its disavowal of international legal constraints, and the abuses carried out in its counterterrorism efforts, commands little respect around the world and has increasing difficulty summoning support in international settings. The erosion of U.S. influence, combined with the new assertiveness of countries that do not see their own interests as advanced by improving the living conditions of others, means that UN negotiations on security and human rights issues are commonly yielding even greater theatrics and stalemates than in Vieira de Mello’s day.

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